Monthly Archives: February 2013

I guess it’s a good thing to see a historian at a glamorous Hollywood event. (I mean, it’s probably better than a glamorous Hollywood event without a historian, right?)

Seen below, left to right: Doris K-G, Daniel D-L, and his wife, Rebecca Miller (who was not identified in the caption of his photo in the NYTimes, but she should have been: Although not a historian, she is the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller; she went to Yale; and she has her own career as an actress, screenwriter, novelist, and director.)

l to r: Historian, Lincoln impersonator, multi-talented person.

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If you ran the New York Times and enjoyed the prestige that comes with doing great journalism and having a large, talented staff, why would you run any of your enterprises under another name? That seems to be the thinking behind the latest business move by the Times: renaming the venerable International Herald Tribune into The International New York Times. It makes sense, particularly if the Times executives have already made the decision to hang onto the old IHT and not spin it off, as they recently chose to to with the Boston Globe and Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

The IHT — which the Times has owned outright since it bought out its partner The Washington Post Co. in 2003 — is already subtitled “The global edition of the New York Times,” so it is only a short step to turn that into the new name.

From the Times’ own story about the change:

Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, publisher of The International Herald Tribune, noted that for most of the newspaper’s long history, it has had New York in its name. The paper (www.ihtinfo.com) was first published in 1887 as the European edition of The New York Herald. Through a series of ownership changes, it became The New York Herald Tribune in 1959.

The paper became The International Herald Tribune in 1967 when The Washington Post Company and the Times Company invested in the paper to keep it afloat after the New York Tribune folded. In 1991, the Post and Times companies became co-owners of the paper. The Times Company bought out The Washington Post Company’s share and became its sole owner in 2003.

The announcement is part of the company’s larger plan to focus on its core brand and building its international presence, the spokeswoman said. On Feb. 20, the Times Company said it was exploring offers to sell The Boston Globe and its other New England media properties. Last year, the company sold its stake in Indeed.com, a jobs search engine, and the About Group, the online resource company.

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Hooray that more than half of the leading contenders for Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards have historical themes.

A question that always hangs over such films is: how accurate are they? Accuracy, of course, is often in the eye of the beholder, but a more useful question might be: do any of these films revise history in a way that improves our historical understanding, warps our historical understanding, or makes no difference?

Keep that in mind tonight when watching the Oscars show a propos the following:

–Les Miz (just how often do the poor break into song?)

–Argo (does it matter that the character played by Ben Affleck was really Hispanic? If you don’t think so, then Ah, go fuck yourself!)

–Zero Dark Thirty (who says that torture “worked”?)

–Lincoln (did one weary, kindly man “free the slaves” all by himself?)

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At the risk of sounding pedantic, I want to point out a classic journalistic error in word choice that appears in a story in today’s NYTimes. From Vatican City, pope-watcher Rachel Donadio writes:

In recent days, often speculative reports in the Italian news media — some even alleging gay sex scandals in the Vatican, others focusing on particular cardinals stung by the child sexual abuse crisis — have dominated headlines, suggesting fierce internal struggles as prelates scramble to consolidate power and attack their rivals in the dying days of a troubled papacy.

The reports, which the Vatican has vehemently refuted, touch on some of the most vexing issues of Benedict’s nearly eight-year reign, including a new round of accusations of child sexual abuse by priests and international criticism of the Vatican Bank’s opaque record-keeping.

The problem: the use of the word “refute.”

To refute an assertion means to prove it false or erroneous. Such proof can only come from those who are hearing or reading the argument and counter-argument.

The word Donadio needed to use was something like rebut – which means to attempt to prove something false or erroneous.

If you say that someone rebutted someone/something, it leaves open the question of whether the rebuttal was successful. If you say someone refuted someone/something, it jumps to the conclusion that the matter is settled. Almost always, journalists should not jump to conclusions or favor one side over the other. A verb that leaves the matter open is almost always preferred.

In fairness to Rachel Donadio, it is entirely possible that the wrong word was inserted into her copy by someone on an editing desk. These things happen all the time, driving reporters to distraction.

Class dismissed.

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The career of Michael Goldfarb, as described in today’s NYTimes, is a great example of the power of the conservative “meme factory” that sustains individuals, institutions, and ideas on the right. It’s the combination of right-wing think tanks and right-wing news media — all created since World War II as an alternative universe to the world of academia and mainstream journalism. It’s a subject I am researching and writing about for what I hope will be my next book.

To quote the Times:

His career was spawned, rather, in the conservative confines of The Weekly Standard and allied organizations, namely the Project for the New American Century, which is well known for promoting the war in Iraq. He has since gone on to thrive in the influential world of outside ideological groups. Mr. Goldfarb, known as a flamethrower on both sides of the aisle, has achieved unparalleled hybrid status in the process.

What this passage suggests is that the conservative Meme Factory is now into its second generation. Many of the key steps that created the Meme Factory in

Irving KristolWikipedia

the first place were taken by Irving Kristol, neocon intellectual entrepreneur and founder of The Public Interest. His son, Bill Kristol, is the founder of The Weekly Standard, which gave Goldfarb his start. Bill Kristol is also the chair of the think tank Project for a New American Century.

At age 32, Goldfarb has passed several times through the revolving door connecting the think tanks and the media.

[FYI, I use a “Google alert” to tell me about new mentions on the Web of the phrase “Covering America.” Turns out, they miss a lot of stuff. If you are using a google alert for something important, don’t assume that it’s catching everything. Do an active search once in a while.]

Thanks to documentary film-maker Ken Burns, a federal magistrate has struck a blow for press freedom that strengthens the legal protections for documentary film-makers, journalists, all sorts of people who prepare non-fiction for audiences, and — not least — those audiences themselves. In this case, everyone wins except the government lawyers who wanted to rummage through Burns’ outtakes from a controversial film.

Briefly, the case involves a 2012 film made by Burns and his daughter, Sarah Burns. The film, titled “The Central Park Five,” tells the true story of a notorious 1989 rape that occurred in New York’s Central Park. It tells of the fateful rush to judgment by law enforcement officials and the railroading of five young African-American men who were sentenced to long jail terms, even though they were innocent of the crime. Eventually, the men sued the city of New York.

Then, the city’s lawyers, presumably seeking some exculpatory material, decided to go fishing in the Burnses’ raw footage. They probably hoped to get lucky and find something that would let the city off the hook or at least muddy the waters. The city’s lawyers demanded access to the Burnses’ notes and outtakes. Right there, they should have known better. What could be more chilling to the practice of journalism (or documentary film-making, or history, for that matter) than having government lawyers picking through the material that doesn’t meet the standard of truth and accuracy. (I know that I have cartons full of notes of material that never saw the light of day because I considered that stuff wrong, unfair, or simply incomprehensible.)

To his credit, Ken Burns resisted that demand and hired lawyers of his own. This week, Magistrate Judge Ronald L. Ellis of United States District Court in Manhattan threw out the government lawyers’ request.

[Before any journalists reading this get too smug, “The Central Park Five” is also a cautionary tale about the news media’s own rush to judgment in the case, which was just as grotesque as that of law enforcement — indeed it may have been a driver of the ultimate injustice.]

So, congrats to Ken and Sarah Burns for standing up for freedom. In the rape case, it turns out the authorities had the wrong guys. In the subpoena for outtakes, it also turns out the authorities had the wrong guys.

From today’s New York Times:

Judge Ellis also ruled that the city failed to meet the requirements for subpoenas to journalists for nonconfidential material: that the material would be significant and relevant to its case and was unavailable elsewhere. He said pretrial depositions would give the city’s lawyers ample opportunity to question the five men.

“It’s a marvelous decision for documentary filmmakers and point-of-view journalists,” Mr. Burns’s lawyer, John Siegal, said. “And it’s an important victory for the media industry generally.”